The Stanza and the Song - Lecture notes 1 PDF

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The Stanza and the Song - Lecture notes 1...

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The Stanza and the Song: Lecture 2 of “Intro to Poetry” Background:  Many of the conventions were being established during Wyatt and Campion’s time. WYATT:  Wyatt’s poems began to be published about 5 years after his death. However, his poems were in circulation before this.  English language was changing at the time he wrote.  It was becoming closer to language we recognise today.  The rules of poetic composition hadn’t been clearly drawn up.  There were competing theories on how poetry should be written.  Many people at the time were interested in how classical metre/poetic forms were to be brought into English.  Critics don’t know how Wyatt heard some words and their pronunciations. Was this poetic rhythm intended as we read it today? Tricky to know the answer to this.  Use of conventional meaning in the two poems.  Trope = rhetorical or figurative convention. E.g. when people call ship ‘she’.  These are often politically loaded. Implies gender roles.                        

Suffering lover is a key trope in his poem. Individuals who have failed in love. This is a central strand to English poetry up until now. The lover is usually male in these poems while the beloved is usually female. Both Wyatt poems explored here draw on these tropes. ‘Change and strange’ as a key rhyme word in his poems. Speaker is simultaneously intensely personal but also conventional. This displays the paradox of public and private utterances. This battle of public vs private continues to define lots of lyric poetry until the confessional poets and indeed the present day. Formal demands aren’t especially tough. E.g. when one hears the first stanza of ‘Blame Not My Lute’, it is understood that the refrain implies blame me, not the lute. This shows the trope of inarticulate lover. However, this idea changes to blame yourself, not me or the lute.. There is a clear overall shape to argument in ‘Blame Not’. Shows he is reproaching his beloved. Final usage of ‘Blame Not My Lute’ is very barbed. Any repetition in a poem calls on reader to perform the line somewhat. ‘How true though art’ is a line that needs sarcasm when performed. ‘What she hath deserved’ – irony in these lines. ‘Kindly’ = bitter sarcasm. Beloved has betrayed him again. However, another reading to this – kindly = sexist trope that women are more likely to be unfaithful. Kindly like ‘your kind’. However, could be other way – typical way of men? Ambiguous irony as shown above is expressive silence/a loaded moment = common in Wyatt poetry. Lyrical expressive outpouring characterises the song. In songs, one was licenced to speak freely. However, Wyatt was at court, which was the political power central. He could not escape societal pressures of time.

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More subtly encrypted ways of discussing societal questions instead. Who is the beloved in his poem? Lover? General trope of female? Or specific person – Anne Boleyn? Second is obviously more dangerous.

CAMPION:  Revised some of early songs after c.20 years. Almost always improved.  Revisions show what he came to favour as a poet. Why original and revised are both important to look at.  Three aspects of writing are important = simple, direct diction that you see in the poem. Tended to edit out more literary phrases in early work and replace with things people would actually say.  Monosyllabic words favoured in revision. Makes poem seem more emotionally direct.  Stipulated that one note should be sung for one syllable.  Metre of poem ‘Never Love Unless you Can’ – catalectic trochaic tetrameter.  Trochee = metrical foot that contains of two syllables. Emphasis on the first. E.g. apple.  Tetrameter = four of those feet to a line.  Cat = final unstressed syllable is cut/left out e.g. ap not apple. Allows tone of line to sound out more strongly.  The line ‘if love may persuade’ was left untouched – first trochaic line in original.  ‘Observations on the Arts of English Poesie’ – published in 1602. Fought for these new traditions  Quantity in poetry = length of time it takes to say a syllable – he was interested in this.  Stress and quantity often coincide. E.g. merry. ‘e’ sound considered longer than the ‘eh’ sound in this in terms of quantity.  There were experiments in this time when trying to pattern English with quantity instead of stress.  Campion’s song tells you something about love and human nature.  It has a didactic function – indeed, the title of the poem explains this – ‘Never Love Unless you Can.  We are less comfortable with didactic art today but it was extremely common then. ROSETTI:  Rosetti wrote many sonnets and sonnet sequences.  Sonnet means “little song”. This shows that song and the sonnet were more closely linked than they are now.  Rosetti employed diverse stanzaic shapes. She often drew on ballad.  Singer referred to as ‘she’, which contrasts with speaker.  This “She” is the speaker’s younger self, who sings songs in hopefulness.  The Speaker is now older and does not sing but instead weeps.  Possible discussion of the same stream in stanza 1 and 2? Shows the fact they are ever linked.  The poem is song-like in nature.  There is lots of repetition and pattern in poem – this is characteristic of song forms.  Syntactic strategies repeated (sentence structure).  Repeated words. E.g. ‘stream’ and ‘sat’.  Speaker’s tears swallowed by sea and the singer’s songs died on air.  Result at end seems to be the same for both the older and younger form – singing or speaking is futile – leaves no trace once you are gone.

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Song arranged to give young self first and last word. The word “Air” could mean tune which is how Rosetti used the term in this poem. Or it could mean where the words that any song live on. Biographies of Rosetti often present images of a youthful Rosetti who gives way to melancholy older woman. This poem characterises them both. Vivache was Rosetti’s childhood nickname, meaning ‘lively’ in Italian. In this way, she is similar to Dickinson as they were both known for their intellectual energy, as well as both being religious. The two women also drew on hymns/nursery rhymes, not canonical literature. However, they did have a tendency to subvert this form. Also, both women never married, and their lives were dominated by father figures. Both lives had a “break”.

DICKENSON:  This poem, “I Died for Beauty” was cast in ballad form.  Her work formally resembles a ballad but is very distinctive from this as she was extremely individualistic.  Half-rhyme was and is important in her poems.  The dashes used make her work easily identifiable – is Dickenson asking us to speed up or slow down? Seem to demand we speed up while impeding our ability to do so.  Does the dash cause a pause in rhythm? A dramatic hesitation? Does it isolate a certain word?  Again, the reader is pushed to perform the poem to decide what the dash means.  Posthumous speaker is used in lots of her poems.  At the end of the poem, at the mention of “moss”, there is an above ground switch. Pans from ‘lips’ to ‘names’. So much time has passed that their tombs are growing old.  It is now hard to read all the poems spoken from the tomb without concluding that Dickenson knew that these poems would be speak after she died.  This vigorous posthumous life seems to be a precondition for many of her poems.  Paradox comes when the speaker tells of how she came to be silenced after event. This is an intensification of the paradox behind the poem itself.  Dickenson loved Bronte, Browning etc. CONCLUSION:  The issues that arise when song makes transition to the page are discussed here.  Official print culture had a homogenising effect. Traditional folk effect squeezed out where the ballad would be remade with each performance, with new elements being added or dropped.  Print stood for fixity. Whatever authority that appears to confer is highly questionable.  There were a whole host of changes introduced.  Changes introduced by errors possibly. Author might may changes of own. Other editors might intervene and make changes.  T. W. Higginson – first publisher of Dickenson.  He was among this tiny circle of people who read Dickenson’s poetry.  He recognised her poetic gifts but didn’t know what to make of her half rhymes etc.  Therefore, he advised her to delay publishing until she had learnt to control her verse. Misplaced advice – she was never going to change.  ‘Control’ meant he wanted her to sound more like other people.  Dickenson never titled poems. This came from publishers etc....